Walnuts destroyed in blaze

STOCKTON - Several tons of walnuts were destroyed during a two-alarm fire in east Stockton on Friday, officials reported.

Jordan Guinn

STOCKTON - Several tons of walnuts were destroyed during a two-alarm fire in east Stockton on Friday, officials reported.

The fire, which officials expected would take about a day to fully extinguish, began about 5:45 p.m. on East Main Street near Bird Avenue.

The fire threatened power lines near the corrugated steel structure as crews scrambled to access water. The nearest hydrant was roughly 2,000 feet away on Bird Avenue, so firefighters needed to connect the hoses to a series of fire engines down Main Street.

"If you just ran a hose from the hydrant to the fire, it would have no pressure once we got it here," said Ralph Ibarra, a chief's operator for the Stockton Fire Department. "By far, getting water to the fire is the biggest challenge."

When a hose attached to a ladder atop a firetruck doused the flames, an acrid smoke cloud of green and yellow hues rose from the building.

The Montezuma Fire District sent a water tanker truck to the scene, but fire hoses snaked across the roadway made its passage impractical during the fire's most intense moments.

Crews contained the flames within 30 minutes, but fully quelling the fire will take much longer, Ibarra said. Firefighters were expected to spend the rest of Friday night and early today raking through piles of walnuts and dousing them with water to prevent flare-ups.

The fire at Steve Lagomarsino Inc. is believed to have started in the drying portion of a shed devoted to the processing of walnuts. The exact cause was unknown.

George Rogers, a neighbor of the property's owner, said much of the equipment in the affected building is less than 2 years old.

Rogers expressed his sympathy for Lagomarsino's loss and said he'd be there to support him.